This is how my voice moves film
A new project exploring the physical experience of stammering through dance.
Theatre creative and Stammers Matter CIC founder Graeme Pickering has turned his personal experience of living with a stammer into a new piece of dance work exploring what stammering can look and feel like beyond words.
Working across casting, choreography and creative direction, Graeme wanted to find a way of bringing his lived experience into his professional practice and creating something that could challenge the way stammering is seen and understood.
With funding from Arts Council England, he developed This Is How My Voice Moves — a wider body of dance work exploring the rhythms, repetitions, pauses and changes of pace that can be part of a person’s experience of stammering.
The work began by listening. Graeme interviewed three people who stammer about their experiences, including the misconceptions they have encountered, the impact these experiences have had on them and how they feel about their stammers today. Their stories became the inspiration for an original piece of music by composer Adam Morris, which provides the soundtrack for the dance. Working alongside choreographer Adam Scott, the team then explored how those rhythms, emotions and experiences could be translated into movement, creating a piece that aims to portray stammering in a way that is truthful, beautiful and empowering.
Representation is at the heart of the project. Two of the dancers featured in the work, Naomi Sonoiki and Joseph Poulton, also have stammers. Joseph, who has worked as a West End performer and dancer for around ten years, recently achieved a significant personal milestone when he secured a speaking role on the West End stage — something he describes as a huge accomplishment after living with a stammer throughout his career. Naomi is a recent graduate and emerging dancer with a promising future in the industry.
The first section of This Is How My Voice Moves has now been released online (watch it above) and has already received a strong response. While the film can simply be watched and enjoyed as a piece of dance, the project has a much wider purpose: to open up conversations, challenge misconceptions and provide more authentic representation of people who stammer in the arts and wider culture.
Graeme hopes to share the work with as many people as possible, using dance as a way to show that stammering is not simply something that happens to a voice. It can have rhythm, movement, emotion and physicality, and, like every person who stammers, it can move in many different ways.
Watch This Is How My Voice Moves on Instagram and follow Graeme.
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